system users does not exist

[Jeff Vian]

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 16:09 +0530, anupama 2004 wrote:
> --
> sir/madam
> Hi
> in my system i have installed fedora core-3
> and i dont know why  some system users are deleted  from /etc/passwd
> file  and when i start some services like postgresql  , sendmail  etc
> the system says system user "postgres"   does't exist
> i have some important data in my system. so pls tell me hoew to include
> these system users again without reinstalling the packages.
>  i tried with forcebly updating the rpms.  but didn't solved the problem
> 
IIRC, if you did an upgrade instead of a clean install, rpm creates
a .rpmnew (the new file) or .rpmsave (the old file) file for each
critical configuration file that needs to be replaced.

Check and see if you have a /etc/passwd.rpmnew or /etc/passwd.rpmsave
file.  If so you probably also have a matching /etc/shadow.rpmxxx file.
If these files exist then it is likely you will need to manually merge
the changes into the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files.